The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.

Overweening Generalist

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Peter Dale Scott, a Colleague of Noam Chomsky

Emeritus Prof. of English at Berkeley, Scott seems like a good foil for Chomsky acolytes. Rather: in an effort to broaden the (political) Chomskyan's view, read Peter Dale Scott. Just a suggestion. Let me elaborate.

As I write, Scott is still writing poetry and (probably) fat non-fiction books on what he calls "deep politics," a term I unpack as something akin to the conspiriology of the academic. Scott appeared alongside Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky at very many anti-war rallies and talks and teach-ins against Unistat state power, sit-ins and consciousness raisers. And in Scott's poetry he doesn't hesitate to reveal his differences with his highbrow colleagues on the Left, whether neo-Marxist or non-Marxist Left, or anarchistic Left.

in a battle for resources made scarce by elite control) Zinn '80 571Zinn writes of the Indian Removal

[Scott cites his sources in his poetry and always includes a bibliography at the end of his books. - O.G.]

Scott says that other prominent American historians skipped over the Indian Removal, and names names, but then, a few lines down:

but by depicting Jackson
as slaveholder speculator exterminator of Indians

Zinn lost sight of the Bank War
in much talk of tariffs banking political parties

political rhetoric Zinn '80 129 along with Jefferson's warnings about an aristocracy

founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations Sellers 106and Adams' Every bank of discount

is downright corruption taxing the public for private individuals' gain Adams '62 9.638

(which Pound made his slogan Cantos 71/416, 74/437, etcas the problem of issue Cantos 87/569 drew him step by step

into singing perpetual war) Cantos 86/568; cf. Williams 180

-pp. 167-169, and if anyone wants the titles cited, ask in the comments...

Here Scott reveals a sympathy with Ezra Pound over banking, where Zinn and Chomsky won't touch Mad Ez. This has always seemed to me an honorable mode of intellectual conservatism: if someone's political action or stance or even character was seen as mostly distasteful, we know that political and social reality are far more complex than choosing who is One of Us or...not. So sure: Andrew Jackson is not exactly a hero of progressive 21st century leftish thought, but his stance on banks is noteworthy. Let us give Jackson his due for this. Similarly, as vile and abhorrent I found the George W. Bush administration, there seems something laudable in their effort to combat AIDS in Africa...

"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Einstein

Scott's poetry is deeply cerebral but I think quite beautiful also. He's always grappling with his privilege as an academic/intellectual, his Buddhism, his personal flaws. But he writes evocatively of love and the deep riches of the natural world too.

For me, the most distinctive feature of his poetry is his Stephen Dedalus-like problem of how to escape the nightmare of history. Can we right our wrongs? Can we make amends for untold atrocities and assaults on the human spirit, conducted in our names? Once we are have knowledge of this darkness, what to do with it, morally? These nightmares! And Peter Dale Scott's reading of history is filled with nightmares. Garishly footnoted nightmares of imperial power's abuses of humans. I would think the bright Young Person deeply committed to Chomsky's readings would want to challenge themselves with the works of Peter Dale Scott. Here, check this out; Scott seems to echo Noam's criticisms of the social sciences:

behind the Soviet philanthropy
which sought to eradicate faith
by use of an Inquisition

and also that of the West
and its priesthoods of social science
who after decades of pressing

unwanted dams and military
torturers on the Third World
have helped liberate the Soviet Union

for a new world order
of Schumpeterian destructiveness
whose outcome is not yet
-p.14

And then later in the long poem, Scott is having a bad day and recalls a cutting remark made by Chomsky that must have felt directed at himself, and Scott's willingness to delve extremely deep into CIA drug running, JFK's assassination, assassinations of Third World figures, mind control operations, etc:

Once again! Insight
beckons down the long corridors
of my insomnia

as to why I have been depressed
since flying back from Europe
the sense of impotence

not just from losing my glasses
or even a week ago
tripping over a sprinkler head

to fall flat on the pavement
and fracture my zygomatic arch
not even Noam's crack

about those who do microanalysis about things that don't matter Chomsky '94 163
No! I have learned from my inability

last night to explain to Fred Frederick Crews
what the unstoppable flow of drugs
across the Mexican border

has to do with the Kennedy assassination
a world where what matters
are not just the structural patterns

but the patterns in chaos
such as the DFS lies Direcion Federal de Seguridad, Mexican Secret Police
about Oswald and Silvia Duran P.D. Scott '95 118-27
-pp.134-135
---------------------------------------------
[Note: Frederick Crews was a Berkeley professor and friend of Scott's. Crews is mostly known for his ongoing attempts to dismantle Sigmund Freud.]

Peter Dale Scott is one of my favorite living poets. His non-fiction books are harrowing, dossier-like researches into what almost all Unistatian citizens would rather not know, or because of existing neural circuitry, are probably incapable of knowing, much less understanding. And yet he's always somehow poetic; it's this odd courageousness that I find so compelling in his writings.

My local libraries have _9/11 and American Empire_, _Cocaine Politics_, _Drugs, Oil, and War_, Obstruction of Justice_, _"Dark Star" and Other Cosmic Jams_, _The War Conspiracy_, and _Deep Politics and the Death of JFK_. Which one do you recommend I start with?

@Mr. 1132: I wd think you'd be innarested in the Seculum trilogy of poetry books (in the 811 section of the library), but if you want to get into the non-fic Deep Politics (in the 362 or 973s), check out The War Conspiracy first: it's older and he's built from there. That one gives you a good grounding re: his thinking style, his documentation, his voice. After that, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Cocaine Politics was written with Jonathan Marshall. IIRC. There were about five books roughly on that same subject that came out within a two-year period, all spooky, all seemingly indebted to McCoy's Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, and I think I dialectally perused four or five of those at one time, all of them stacked next to my reading chair, and I can't say what was distinctive about PDS/Marshall there, as they're all intertwingled in my mind.

After that, if you're still into it, fire away, Gridley. I did what I call a "deep skim" with The Road to 9/11 and found a predictably thick, seasoned, narrative about deep political reality. Honestly? It was at a moment in my life where I knew that if I sat down and read it cover-to-cover I might get all weirded-out, and I didn't want to do that to myself then, in one of my more fragile mindstates.

I don't like to use interlibrary loan except for books I can't buy cheaply. Books I order through interlibrary loan often seem to arrive when I don't have enough time to read them.

Some societies value poetry but have other problems. Ireland puts a high value on poetry, but has challenges with alcohol and the puritanical aspects of its Catholic heritage, as well as the Catholic/Protestant conflicts.

LINK + is not interlibrary loan, per se. Although you are getting books from another library system, you don't have to fill out a form or pay extra. The books shd arrive within 3 or 4 days, and you can renew them once, so you should be able to keep them for up to 5 weeks.

This is all predicated on whether your local system has bought into the LINK+ system. Mine has, and I have access to something like 60 other libraries for "free" (local taxes pad for it).

I will have to check it out. My first thought - perhaps I can get those nine David Thomson books I haven't read. Last time I checked the Corona Library and the Riverside Library charged for interlibrary loan. I hadn't heard of LINK+ before. Thanks for the info.

Isn't Riverside Public Library near? I don't know your area very well, except it's spread out, not condensed. If you have to drive 15 miles to get a book maybe it's better shelling for interlibrary loans.

There are some fairly low prices on used Thomson books at half.com. Lately, whenever I buy a book frpm that site I usually pay twice for shipping what the book costs...and S/H is 3.49 bookrate last I looked.

I have seen ZERO evidence he's a Marxist. Rather, PDS would be considered part of the non-Marxist left-ish Unistat professors. But he seems to have some classically conservative views, too. By which I mean Edmund Burke-conservative.

But mostly he's in opposition to the military-industrial complex, the one Ike warned us about.

I just finished Coming to Jakarta, which I enjoyed. I can see where you relate Scott's vision to that of Stephen Dedalus. I also think of Pound's "The enemy is ignorance: our own." Reading this book made me feel very ignorant.

I don't think I've really understood the music of Scott's verse. The section's whose sound I liked best evoked the music of Pound's poetry when Scott discussed Ez.

Part of me wants to read more of Scott's poetry and prose, but at my back I hear Joyce's chariot, full of beer.

I'm glad you got something out of PDS, but who can blame you if you hear the call of beerian Joyce?

PDS, as Buddhistic as he is, still feels like an academic poet, and I don't mean that disparagingly. He often talks about academic life, and I find that interesting. But he never reaches the wildness of Ez or JJ. Not for me he doesn't.

For now, I took Ulysses off the shelf this morning, and I just read a few lines of Dante and Finnegans Wake. My Dante group will finish the Paradiso around the end of January. The Catholic Church calls 2012 the Year of Grace. I don't think they mean Grace O'Malley, but I would like to finish my Wilson/Joyce book next year. Bob told me I should read Ulysses 40 times. I have a long way to go.

For PDS's ideas on Watergate and its possible connections to Dallas - ala Oglesby and others - his big non-fiction books seem the place to delve. I can't tell you which book is the best for PDS on Watergate. Anyone here know?

About Me

I have furore scribendi which veers into verborrhea. My favorite media (anything that mediates between our sensoria and what is outside our skin) are, in order: books, Internet, CDs (!), DVDs, TV, clothes. I like hoppy beer and New World zins, Indian and Thai food, John Coltrane, JS Bach and heavy metal, the Lakers and Angels, redwood trees, hiking and yoga, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, heretical ideas and pornography. If you want me to write for you, for money, contact rmjon23[at]aol[dot] com. You can also drop a line and say hi, but please be nice 'cuz I'm a delicate creature of Nature.

Sir Isaiah Berlin

"An intellectual is a person who wants ideas to be as interesting as possible. Unless you think the ideas you are discussing are interesting to you, whatever you may believe yourself, the history of ideas will remain a catalogue of unexamined doctrines, terribly boring and unreal."

-Isaiah Berlin, in conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo

Leonardo da Vinci

Epitome of Renaissance Man

Athanasius Kircher (c.1600-1680)

The last universal polymath? The last man to know everything? Egyptologist, archaeologist, mathematician, vulcanologist, physicist, biologist.